Neurodivergent Minds in Varoufakis’ Future (Another Now)

What if a fairer world still leaves the quietest voices behind?

Who does the system reward? What if justice still means you have to make your voice heard in a room that intimidates you?

Yanis Varoufakis' Another Now is a radical political imagination: a billionaires-less world, where technology is everybody's property, and it is the many rather than the few who make decisions. Work is solidarity. Democracy is face-to-face. Digital spaces replace boardrooms. Civic life is ongoing and inclusive.

And yet…

Some may get left behind even in utopia.

Not because they disagree:

• But because their bodies don’t feel safe in the systems we’re told will free us.

• What happens when inclusion requires performance?

• What happens when engagement costs more than money?

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Civic Engagement and the Hidden Tax of Trauma

Varoufakis’ model relies on synchronous participation—people joining together in real time to discuss, debate, and decide. It's energising for those who can keep pace. But not everyone can.

For those with trauma histories, live engagement is felt as always teetering on the edge of harm. The demand to speak, answer, and modulate in the moment activates nervous systems that are geared for self-preservation, not for gradual thinking. For autistic and neurodivergent people, sensory overload and social ambiguity create these environments as possibly more akin to exposure than empowerment (Porges, 2011).

This is not a matter of will. This is one of the mismatches between human nervous systems and system design.

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And thus the question is still—what if a better world is still not safe to live in?

While a billionaire-less world is a step in the right direction, is a world without billionaires the best if it still prioritises paying the strongest nervous systems first?

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What Is Nervous System Privilege?

Nervous system privilege is rarely ever mentioned in policy, yet it's everywhere.

It is the unearned privilege of being able to remain regulated and socially responsive in the face of stress, according to Rankin (2021). Individuals who had access to ordinary care, emotional co-regulation, and minimal trauma often have this privilege in silence and also often benefit from being able to navigate stressors that can overwhelm others.

They can tolerate conflict. They recover quickly from stress. They can engage.

For others, those with complex trauma, neurodivergence, chronic illness, or histories of marginalisation, civic participation, even in a fairer system, may still trigger shutdown or dissociation (Dana, 2018; Schore, 2001).

If democracy is built on presence, what happens to those who need absence to survive?

Nervous System Privilege and the Policing of Vulnerability

There is a second facet of nervous system privilege that is often ignored: deep, early conditioning around emotional repression.

Youth raised in societies where the expression of emotions was shamed, punished, or mocked are likely to learn to suppress their vulnerability to stay safe (Heller & LaPierre, 2012). As adults, these people may become intensely uncomfortable in the presence of open emotional expression (around neurodivergent or other nervous system needs), and unconsciously move to shut it down in themselves and others.

When put in a position of leadership or authority, these kinds of individuals are likely to confuse emotional expression with chaos, instability, or danger. Their conditioned reactions, deriving from their own pain in the past, can then dictate whole systems that downplay vulnerability and raise control.

This dynamic creates hostile conditions for the expression of embodied sensitivity, trauma-awareness, or neurodivergent authenticity; in fact, it is often labelled as being unembodied. Emotional openness is pathologised in such systems. Regulation is sometimes upheld in ways that prioritise control over connection. Policies are framed in terms of "safety" but often communicate a latent fear of affective truth (van der Kolk, 2014; Maté, 2022).

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This isn't a moral failing—it's a pattern of trauma made structural.

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But when left unexplored, this kind of trauma-organised leadership causes deep harm to the neurodiversity of our world. It confirms systems that reward detaching and punish expression. It silences the very voices we most need to hear.

So the question is:

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How do we create systems not necessarily for the loudest or quietest voice, but for the most exposed truth?

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